Hawthorne was an unwitting pioneer of the Berkshires’ cultural tourism industry, because the benefactors of his brief sojourn later gave the estate that included the Little Red House to the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
In 1900, The New York Times ran an article under this headline: HAWTHORNE’S STAY IN LENOX. Below is a replica of the cottage where he wrote Tanglewood Tales, and The House of Seven Gables.
His chance meeting and subsequent relationship with Herman Melville, during a rain-interrupted Monument Mountain hike in August 1850, led Melville to re-draft Moby-Dick, which he then dedicated to Hawthorne the following year. That Hawthorne remains dim in the too-bright shadow of Shakespeare is only because readers fail to heed one of the best (if 4 years late) book reviews ever written, Melville’s Hawthorne and His Mosses. See also: American Heritage 1975, Hawthorne, Melville on Monument Mountain.
Although the intervening centuries are like rigor mortis to the sound of the verse, this poem of Hawthorne’s, from 1820, will speak its truth forever.
Poetry by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Oh could I raise the darken’d veil
Oh could I raise the darken’d veil,
Which hides my future life from me,
Could unborn ages slowly sail,
Before my view—and could I see
My every action painted there,
To cast one look I would not dare.
There poverty and grief might stand,
And dark Despair’s corroding hand,
Would make me seek the lonely tomb
To slumber in its endless gloom.
Then let me never cast a look,
Within Fate’s fix’d mysterious book.
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